I stopped when Sandra parked her motorbike opposite the green cross of the chemist’s. I was a few metres in front of her, watching through the rear-view mirror as she entered and left the shop, after which she got on the motorbike, glanced in my direction and rode off. She was returning to Villa Sol and would have to keep seeing the faces of those two doddering monsters who knew a thousand ways of getting rid of people and for whom a life wasn’t sacred but something to be used as a weapon.
Salva and I saw a lot of things in Mauthausen. We saw walking skeletons and masses of naked bodies walking on the snow in the courtyard, a strange, ashen, pinkish-toned kind of livestock. Our bodies became our shame. Pains in the stomach because of hunger, illnesses, lack of intimacy. It was all about the body. It wasn’t easy to rise above one’s own mortal frame, so one thought of suicide every other day. It was a form of liberation for me to think that all this could have an end and that, if I wanted, it could be all over for me. Death was my salvation. Hitler was sick and had destroyed all of us in his terrible mind. We lived in the vile brain of this man, where the most monstrous atrocities occurred, and there was only one way to get out of his head. Either he died or I died. I couldn’t bear to see this marvellous life, with its sun, its trees and its songs, being turned into something so dreadful. But I didn’t want his dementedness to kill me. I had wanted to do it of my own free will, looking at the sky if I could. I had sat down next to the hut, taken from my pocket a bit of the stone that we’d broken off in the quarry and cut my veins. Someone who saw me told Salva and Salva saved me. I don’t know how he managed it but he saved me, he healed my wounds and said that, whatever happened, although we were up to our necks in shit, although we were humiliated, and although we were the lowest class of slaves, my life was mine. Of course it wasn’t a good life, wasn’t a decent life or a life worthy of living, but it was mine and no one else could live it for me. And okay, Salva, Hitler died before us, but he left so much evil behind him, so much evil in my heart. I often dream they won the War and wake up sweating.
Salva, you were referring to the ampoules of this stuff these decrepit old Nazis inject themselves with when you mentioned eternal youth, weren’t you? Maybe they stumbled upon some anti-ageing formula with their numerous awful experiments, a formula they only apply among themselves. Where could they be making it?
My understanding of Salva’s intentions was increasingly clear. He’d left a great project in my hands and I’d have to make it more and more mine with my enquiries and my own motivations. No doubt Salva knew a lot if he’d managed to light on the elixir of eternal youth, but he didn’t want to set my course, didn’t want to use me for his own revenge. I think he wanted to put this toy in my hands, to give me this gift. It was his wish to give me one last chance.
If there was any firm basis to all this surmising, I now knew how to hurt them. It was a question of cutting off their supplies of the elixir. Karin would contract until she ended up as a twisted heap in a wheelchair. Alice would shrivel like a raisin and the men would lose all their vitality. I wondered if their whippersnappers, if this Martín, for example, knew what he was carrying when he took the packets from one house to another.
The problem was Sandra. Sandra was a matter of conscience. Sandra, if I pressured her, would be capable of bringing me one of the ampoules, whose content we could get analysed. This might then lead us to the laboratories that produced it. But was I going to consent to a girl who had her whole life before her, who’d tried to protect me from having an accident on the motorbike, putting herself in such danger? However, I had to get to the end. I owed it to Salva, who’d remembered me in his last moments and who’d given me the opportunity of victory.
Sandra
They’d stopped hiding the packet with the ampoules. They were stashed in the chest of drawers with a couple of syringes for when Karin needed them. If any one of them went missing, they’d know I’d taken it and that would be no joke. I’d basically been shedding lots of things, including a lot of fright, but good luck doesn’t last for ever.
When I arrived I put the plastic bag on the kitchen workbench, took a spoon out of the drawer, opened the bottle of cough medicine and took a dose in front of them.
“We were worried,” Karin said. “You took such a long time.”
“I didn’t know,” I said, slightly jumpy. “I didn’t look at the time.”
I coughed so they’d stop quizzing me. And one cough led to another, a real one. I couldn’t stop coughing.
“We don’t want to meddle in your life, but the thing is, we’re worried. At night, that road, all those bends and in your state. You’ve got to look after yourself. We only want good things for you.”
Karin had recovered. Her expression was alert and scary. She watched me coughing without doing anything. I had to hang on to the kitchen sink as I kept coughing. It was Fred who got up and handed me a glass of water.
“You should get to bed. You’re not well,” Karin said.
She didn’t tell me to sit down with them. But I wanted to spend the least possible amount of time in their company. They didn’t seem so nice any more. Behind these faces were the ones of their youth, insolent and unscrupulous. Perhaps age and what she’d learnt along the way to this point had softened Karin somewhat, and her own weakness would have made her more human too, or at least would have obliged her to recognize that she needed the help of others. But even if she lived a thousand years, I’d never have any idea of what this woman was thinking and feeling, a woman who with a steady hand had injected all kinds of shit into prisoners’ bodies and helped to carry out experiments on twins. If all that had seemed normal to her, if between one atrocity and another she could enjoy reading her love stories, I would never be able to know what she was thinking and what plans she had in mind for me.
I said that if I didn’t get better I’d have to go back to my family.
They looked at me, both of them very serious.
In order to escape their eyes, I went to the fridge and poured myself a glass of milk. I put it in the microwave while I was trying to think about what else I could say without blurting out anything that would give me away.
“You have a future here,” said Fred. “Your son deserves to have a chance. You’ll always have your family. You can’t keep hiding under their skirts – is that the expression? – all your life.”
“We don’t have children or grandchildren,” Karin added, “but somebody has to come after us and somebody will have to keep planting this garden and filling the pool with water in the summer. I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying.”
I took the glass from the microwave and started sipping the milk. They were acknowledging that they would be my longed-for grandparents, the ones that would sort out my life. The problem was that the idea of them being my longed-for grandparents no longer appealed.
“What you did today,” Fred said, “was a very brave attempt. Before Otto handed over the packet, you went to the bathroom and checked it out. Frida told us. We’d like to believe that, if it had been possible, you would have stolen to help Karin.”
I didn’t say anything but just smiled a little as I drank. It wasn’t true. I wouldn’t have taken the risk for Karin and neither would I have gone so far as to steal. I did what I did because I wanted to know, because the idea of going back to my previous life, leaving things as they were, was unbearable. Not many people have something as important as this in their hands. I didn’t know anything about Nazis before meeting Julián. Julián had come here looking for them and I’d found them without looking for them, or they’d found me, and here we were, the three of us, in the kitchen, playing the game of me being their favourite granddaughter.
“You can’t go through life alone,” Karin pronounced. “When you’re alone, everything is much more difficult, you’re restricted to what you can do by yourself, whereas if you have the support of others, of many others, what was once impossible can become possible. The group gives power. The hard p
art is finding a group willing to accept us and protect us.”
I didn’t say anything. I looked at them and kept sipping.
“You have a family that you love, and you should be much closer to it,” Fred continued. Whenever Fred spoke, Karin observed him very intently, opening her eyes as wide as she could. Now I realized that she was jumpy because she was afraid he’d make some kind of blooper. “And apart from your family, you can have us and all our friends.”
“Otto and Alice?” I asked.
Karin held out her arm and took hold of my hand. I shuddered feeling her skin, her fingers on my hand. I managed not to make any movement that might betray my revulsion until I could gently remove it and pick up the glass.
“Yes, you already know a few.”
They looked at each other in apparent agreement over revealing something important. Karin took the floor.
“We’ve knocked at several doors and people have given us their opinions of you. It wouldn’t be impossible for you to join our Brotherhood. It wouldn’t be easy of course. We’d have to convince some very stubborn people. We’re all very old, very conservative, and it’s hard for us to get used to new faces and yet … I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but it’s the young people who are most against your joining.”
“I don’t know what a brotherhood is. Is it like a cult?”
“Something like that.” Fred nodded his head.
Karin rebuked him with a glance. There was no way she’d ever put him down in public. She’d never do that to her great work, her officer with a Gold Cross, but it didn’t stop her wanting to.
“We’re talking about helping each other, having dinners all together, parties and, when somebody has a problem, helping that person. I don’t know what a cult is,” Karin concluded.
“I’m quite tired,” I said, letting out another cough. “You both know you can count on me for whatever you need, but this Brotherhood thing… I’m not sure if I’d know how to be part of a brotherhood, I don’t know what I’d have to do…”
Karin got up, came over to me and stroked my hair. I didn’t twitch a muscle. She really was acting like a grandmother.
“Get a good night’s rest and think about it. Tomorrow you’ll see things more clearly.”
“Goodnight,” I said getting up and going over to the stairs. On the first step I remembered the cough medicine and went back to get it. I thought it better to keep an eye on it.
“In case I get a coughing attack,” I said.
Karin raised her voice so I’d hear her as I moved away.
“We’re neglecting the baby clothes.”
I dropped off to sleep thinking I’d have to tell Julián all this as well.
Julián
When I got to the hotel after leaving Sandra at the chemist’s, things turned ugly. Although, according to my reckoning, Roberto was supposed to be on duty, there was nobody in reception. It crossed my mind that he might have gone to the toilet or to smoke a cigarette, mechanical thoughts that pop up all by themselves without your having to make any effort. I’d been thinking about injections, about Sandra and how her hair had grown quite a lot, and how she was wearing it in a ponytail, which made her look younger. She’d lost her spontaneity and her gaze now lay somewhere between seriousness and incredulity. She’d discovered fear, not the fear of not knowing what to do with her life, but fear of other people. There was no going back now. Sandra was jumping over a precipice with no one holding her back, no one helping her, not even me.
The surprise came when I got to my room and saw Tony, the hotel detective, coming out. What would he have been looking for?
I asked if there was some problem. He moved aside so I could go in, but I didn’t go in. I didn’t want to be in there with him and nobody else.
Without batting an eyelid or looking in the least discomfited at having been caught in the act of illicitly entering my suite, he said he’d come to check that I was all right. It was pure routine, he claimed with every bit of his moon face. And he ended with a question to which there was no conceivable answer.
“Everything in order?”
The transparent scraps of paper were on the floor and nothing had apparently happened inside, except that I perceived Tony’s hand on the knobs of the drawers and doors and his rotten-egg gaze on the papers (inconsequential jottings) on the table.
Sandra
The next day I woke up wanting to phone my parents, my sister and even Santi. I was moving too far away from my normal life. It was as if I’d gone travelling to another planet and the homeward-bound spaceship had broken down, stranding me there. I was overwhelmed by impotence, especially since if anybody asked me if they’d harmed me, or ill-treated me or tried something against me, I’d have nothing objective or specific to say for myself. I’d have to talk of looks, words with double meanings, suspicions, and it would all add up to total vagueness, suppositions and apprehensions. If I took the step of joining the Brotherhood maybe I’d find out about everything but Heaven knows what I’d have to do. I didn’t imagine they’d let me become one of them without my getting my hands dirty, and once I’d dirtied my hands I’d have to cope with having that on my conscience. It wouldn’t be so easy to get out of the clan or sect or brotherhood. I wasn’t finding it so easy to get out of my relationship with Santi, and leaving this weird group was going to be even less so.
Now that Karin was feeling better again, she’d probably want to go running around all over the place in the four-by-four, but I needed some time for my things. After I’d showered, made my bed and tidied up a bit, I went down for breakfast and, as I’d guessed, Karin had beaten me to it. And, more than I could hear her, I could smell Frida cleaning. As soon as she saw me, Karin told me she had a plan for today, while making me a milk coffee. The dreaded plan.
It was sunny and I drank my coffee looking out at the branches of the trees. There was a beautiful long window over the sink and the marble worktop, which made the kitchen very bright and cheerful. Karin set about making me some fruit juice – well not for me but for her, because she wanted to soften me up so I’d do everything she wanted. She squeezed the oranges herself with a vitality that made me suspect she’d had another shot from those ampoules. In that case, she’d only have two left so it would be far too risky for me to take one.
The plan was to go shopping in the department store. She loved checking out all the different sections, being amazed by how low the prices were and by all the beautiful things that people thought of designing. She loved the household-items section and I always had to drag her away from there. It killed me, it bored me, but she loved working off her energy like that. It was all about her feeling alive. Then we’d go to the gym, where I’d leave her, which would give me an hour to try and see Julián. I’d have to postpone calling my family until I had more time. At least the syrup was working and I was coughing less.
What I had on my mind now were the injections. As soon as I remembered them, they colonized my head. Fred had gone off to play golf with Otto and a few more “brothers”, Frida was downstairs, making her usual noises of moving furniture in the library-den, and Karin had decided to wait for me on the porch. I told her I was going to get my bag, which was true, but, before going to my room, I slipped into Fred’s and Karin’s, leaving the door open in case Frida came up. Frida had a very highly developed sixth sense and intuited when somebody was about to break the rules, as I was doing now. I went straight into the bathroom and looked in the rubbish basket. I had to use my fingers to move aside tissues stained with snot and Heaven knows what else, and there was one of the syringes. I dug further down, and there was the other one. Karin had gone for two jabs to get a bit more pleasure out of life.
I was really nervous. If Frida caught me in there I was done for. I tore off a bit of toilet paper and wrapped up the syringes, then jumbled all the rubbish up in the basket and went into my room just as Frida started polishing the stair rail. I came out with my bag, the smallest one I have, hanging diago
nally across my chest. In a little pocket inside it were the syringes wrapped up in toilet paper. I prayed that something more pressing would have attracted Frida’s attention so she wouldn’t have caught on. A couple of things occurred to me, like going back into Karin’s bedroom, opening the flask of perfume on her dressing table and having a splash, just enough for the bloodhound Frida to detect it and to explain my presence in that rosy gilded sanctuary, but then that would be absolute and utter proof that I’d gone in there and had most probably nicked the syringes. It was better not to do anything and not to make any more blunders than necessary.
The banister was mahogany and very intricately carved with all sorts of ins and outs and cracks that gathered dust, so when Karin and I left, Frida was still polishing it. What was she thinking about when she threw herself into these jobs with so much zeal? I picked up the velvet bag with the little pullover I was making plus the knitting needles, giving Karin the message that at some point I was going to sit down and knit while I was waiting for her in the shopping centre.
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 20
